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Christopher Bird writes about things.Mon, 23 Apr 2018 13:00:39 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.9MGK Ranks Every Live-Action Marvel Movie Since 1998 (2018 Remix Edition)http://mightygodking.com/2018/04/23/mgk-ranks-every-live-action-marvel-movie-since-1998-2018-remix-edition/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mgk-ranks-every-live-action-marvel-movie-since-1998-2018-remix-edition
http://mightygodking.com/2018/04/23/mgk-ranks-every-live-action-marvel-movie-since-1998-2018-remix-edition/#commentsMon, 23 Apr 2018 13:00:39 +0000http://mightygodking.com/?p=10554(Since the last time I did this in 2014, there have been fifteen new Marvel movies from various studios released to theatres, so an update was warranted.)

THE ONES THAT ARE JUST TOTAL SHIT

47. Fantastic Four (2015) A godawful mess on every possible level, and no, even Michael B. Jordan doesn’t come away looking particularly good. Completely misses the point of the Fantastic Four on every level, but also misses the point of superhero movies in general. The script is dull both in terms of overall story arc and dialogue (there is not one joke in the entire goddamn movie that lands), plus its direction is hamfisted at best, with visual FX that mostly look cheap. An astonishing misfire that nearly ended Josh Trank’s career and got a lot of people fired, and all of it deservedly.

46. Man-Thing Brief theatrical run that was so brief it’s a direct-to-DVD in spirit. You have probably never seen it. You missed absolutely nothing. It is a mess in every possible way you can imagine, like Roger Corman came back from the dead (well, he’s not dead, but he hasn’t directed a movie in years so he might as well be, that’s what I say) and decided to make a SyFy Original Marvel Movie, which is basically what this is. It’s only not last because it’s so clumsy that it’s got that Asylum sort of charm, where you watch it and wonder what these bumblefucks thought they were doing, and because not so much money was wasted on it as on Fantastic Four.

45. Elektra A completely joyless slog that feels five times longer than it is, looking muddy and dull throughout – I mean, we all rightfully criticize today’s action blockbusters for adhering to that teal/orange color dichotomy like it is law, but at least teal and orange doesn’t look awful and bland all the time like Elektra does with its near-universal beige visuals. Tack on a nearly incoherent plot, action scenes which rely so heavily on bullet-time that the entire thing feels like it’s in slo-mo, and the pacing of a dead turtle and you have one of the worst “true” theatrical Marvel releases of the modern era. Heck, it’s probably worse than the 1990 Captain America and the Corman Fantastic Four. (It’s definitely worse than the Dolph Lundgren Punisher.)

44. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer An incoherent load of below-par SFX, a storyline that made little sense, next to no jokes (and how can you have a good F4 movie without at least some jokes?), but at least it’s over relatively soon because it’s 92 minutes long and that’s with a lot of very obvious script padding (as scenes just all go too long) because they didn’t have enough ideas to fill ninety lousy goddamn minutes. A complete waste of Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans, who don’t even get to shine like they did in the first film. Not even slightly ironically fun.

THE ONES THAT ARE BAD

43. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Critics were kinder to this than it deserved. “Spider-Man kills the baddie” is a trope that needs to simply not be a thing. The plot is stutter-stop because there are, of course, two villains (Jamie Foxx is an awful Electro and Dane DeHaan is an especially awful Harry Osborn/Green Goblin) with mostly-separate plotlines that make the film seem nearly schizophrenic. Gwen Stacy’s death feels editorially mandated in the worst possible way.

42. X-Men Origins: Wolverine Proof that you can spend an immense amount of money on a superhero movie, have competent filmmakers, have a solid cast (seriously: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schrieber, Ryan Reynolds, Danny Huston – that’s damn good) and it can still be a creative failure in every way that matters. The grimdarkness of the mid-period X-franchise permeates this on every level. Worth mentioning in discussion only for somehow, on a very belated scale, allowing the Deadpool movie to happen.

41. Punisher: War Zone It has a sort of craziness to it that I admire, Ray Stevenson is an inspired casting choice for the Punisher and Dominic West’s Jigsaw is enjoyably loony. But the problem is that simply taking Garth Ennis comic dialogue and putting it on screen does not work – there is printed page material and there is reading aloud material, and what is poetic on the page falls flat when you say it aloud. “There are times when I’d like to get my hands on God” is an amazing line in print, but spoken aloud it becomes bombastic and silly in a way that’s almost impossible to avoid. And the action is mostly bland, which is unforgivable for a Punisher film. A Punisher film, to work properly, should have the action of a John Woo classic combined with the moral dread of a Coen Brothers drama. This is not that.

40. Ghost Rider I think Nicolas Cage’s commitment to the wackiness of the idea of Ghost Rider is underrated even though he was slightly too old for the role when he first played Johnny Blaze – but when you’re saying “hey, 2007 Nicolas Cage is the best thing about this movie,” you know it’s probably not that good a movie because ironically liking Shitty Nicolas Cage is bad and this is bad. Ghost Rider overexplains itself like all get out, which is fatal in a movie that is about a guy who has a flaming skull for a head and rides a motorcycle that is also on fire. (ASIDE: Peter Fonda should have been a lock to be Mephisto and it just doesn’t sing.)

39. Blade: Trinity A mediocre third outing to the franchise which more or less killed it. (FUN FACT: they were hoping to spin a Nightstalkers franchise out of this film. Man, did that not work or what?) At this point the Blade flicks were running out of ideas – when you go to the Dracula well in a vampire-related franchise that’s rarely a good sign unless you invert it cleverly (a la Buffy in season four) and this movie did not do that. It’s not outright terrible by any means: there are some fun performances here (Patton Oswalt is particularly enjoyable), Wesley Snipes is quite reliable as Blade as he always is, and the action sequences are mostly competent. But it’s not anything other than a third movie in a dying series and it doesn’t elevate beyond that.

38. Fantastic Four (2005) It’s more coherent than its sequel, but remains mostly not very good. You see this for Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans’ performances, which are both excellent. Everything else about this movie is bland: Jessica Alba’s Sue is boring, Ioan Gruffud’s Reed doesn’t really work (it’s like he’s got an idea of who Reed is but can’t quite get there to make it work) and the less said about Julian McMahon’s Dr. Doom the better. Between this and the Trank I do wonder if it’s even possible to make a Fantastic Four movie that works for a mass audience, because the F4’s whole deal, really, is that they’re cool because they’re mostly so militantly uncoool, and that doesn’t play in Hollywood executive meetings.

37. Hulk There are a lot of contrarians who like to pretend that this is a good movie. It isn’t a good movie; it’s a misfire. A misfire by talented creators, to be sure, because Ang Lee was trying to do something to work outside the superhero box, and it shows: the film is a substantial whole, a work unto itself, trying to say something in a visual language entirely new to comics movies by outright adapting comics visual vocabulary to do it. Which is a really interesting idea, to say the least. The problem is that this language is visually unappealing and in service to a story that is simply dreadful: I defy anyone to explain the ending in a way that makes sense, and the bit with the gamma-irradiated poodle is just stupid.

36. The Amazing Spider-Man Excellent performances by Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone can’t redeem a clumsily plotted Spider-Man origin story and a major mangling of Spidey’s character (if your Spider-Man story has him consumed by revenge, you are doing it wrong). A massive mangling of the Lizard as the villain doesn’t help either.

35. X-Men: Apocalypse “A huge and talented cast is almost entirely wasted by a perfunctory and boring script” seems like it could describe more than a few superhero movies, but I am hard-pressed to think of a major-budget superhero picture that feels as obligatory as this one. It’s just boring as shit, with tons of FX to compensate for the fact that Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy are clearly completely bored to death with Magneto and Xavier, and when Fassbender and McAvoy are checked out there’s simply not a lot to carry the new-generation X-flicks because these films depend so heavily on their charisma.

34. Daredevil Another victim of the “what makes a superhero more relatable is making the superhero grittier and more morally compromised” school of superhero moviemaking, but at least ends with Daredevil rejecting that philosophy, so that’s something, I guess? Ben Affleck’s performance as Matt Murdock is acceptable, as is Michael Clarke Duncan’s Kingpin, but neither is amazing; only Colin Farrell’s Bullseye is greatly entertaining. Jennifer Garner’s Elektra is kinda bad, but not so bad to make the movie memorably bad; it is forgettable popcorn fare in the bare-minimum sort of way.

THE ONES THAT ARE PASSABLE I GUESS

33. X-Men: The Last Stand This one gets pounded a lot because it’s supposedly the weakest of the X-flicks (it’s not) and because it awkwardly merges multiple classic comics storylines into a weird melange (yeah, okay, but all the X-movies do that) and because Brett Ratner’s direction is, to say the least, uninspired (totally fair). But it has some nice bits. It has Ellen Page in it as Shadowcat! And Kelsey Grammer’s Beast is exactly who Beast needed to be. It could have been so much worse, and it is not. That’s something?

32. Spider-Man 3 Some nerds love to hate on the Dancin’ Evil Peter sequence, and I am not one of them – it’s fun. That having been said: like the other Spider-Man movies, this has a lot of craftsmanship in it. But it again goes to the “Spider-Man needs to have someone to seek revenge against for Uncle Ben’s death” well, which is awful and terrible and completely misses the point of the character. (It really drives home how ambitious Christopher Nolan was to remove revenge as a motive for Batman in his trilogy.) Combine that with the needless inclusion of Venom as demanded by the studio’s marketing department and you have a movie which is cluttered, confused and flawed.

31. The Incredible Hulk Probably the poster child for ensuring a lack of downside risk in a Marvel movie, which likely makes it the blueprint off which future Marvel films were based. There is nothing wrong with Incredible Hulk, other than that it is fairly predictable and fairly safe as entertainment goes, avoiding risk in vast chunks and doing its level best to avoid offending any viewer regardless of preference. But, again: this is a movie that knows what it wants to do and does it competently and professionally. Artistry is sort of an optional extra.

30. The Wolverine This is the “okay” Wolverine solo movie. It is defiantly average as superhero movies go. There are ninjas. And Wolverine. And that is basically it. I mean, it’s nice to see a superhero movie with a majority-person-of-color-cast, that’s certainly true, but you can’t shake the feeling that this entire $100 million movie was sort of improvised on a page-by-page basis based on when the ninjas were available. But at least they’re fun ninjas.

29. Iron Man 2 I know some people are going to complain about a Robert Downey Jr. As Iron Man movie being ranked this low, but here is my counterpoint: tell me what this movie was about off the top of your head. Because you can’t. I had to actively think for a while to remember who the villain was (it’s Mickey Rourke! Remember that? Mickey Rourke was the villain in the second Iron Man movie) or any detail of the plot other than “RDJ quips, and War Machine stuff, and um Black Widow makes her debut in the Marvel movies.” That was all I had. This is not to say that Iron Man 2 isn’t entertaining. It is. But it’s also mostly insubstantial.

28. Blade II Guillermo del Toro’s only Marvel movie is occasionally (but not always) visually striking, and has that gritty-B-movie fun factor that the original Blade had as well. And it’s got tons of great genre actors in it: Donnie Yen, Ron Perlman, a very young Norman Reedus, the guy who played Cat in Red Dwarf, that sort of thing. But it’s got a boring plot (basically: vampires versus zombie vampires) that’s just there to string together the fight sequences. Which are mostly great, admittedly, but Del Toro had already made better than this and would surpass this easily; it’s really kind of a low point in his catalogue.

27. Avengers: Age of Ultron There’s a good movie in here somewhere, but this is probably the apex of Marvel movies being studio-driven in their mandate to continue the overarcing metaplot tying everything together and it suffers for that. (Marvel course-corrected shortly afterward and it’s probably not a coincidence that when Guardians of the Galaxy, a project which has a lot of James Gunn’s personal sensibilities in it, made a fuckton more money than this did, that Marvel started allowing their directors to personalize their projects a little more.) I think James Spader’s turn as Ultron is really underrated, and the action sequences are good, but it’s just a movie that suffers from Too Much Movie bloat.

26. The Punisher This one is one of the more underrated Marvel flicks, mostly because people had enormously overinflated hopes for a Punisher movie “done right.” This is because the Punisher, outside of comics, is just your bog-standard vigilante/murder fantasy, and that doesn’t translate remarkably well to film because it just becomes, well, a vigilante movie. The Thomas Jane Punisher movie, however, is probably the best of them; if you forgot Marvel Comics existed, this would be a decent crime/revenge movie. It has good action, decent performances from Jane and John Travolta, and a solid plot. Certainly it can be described as unambitious, but then again this is a movie that aims for “solid” and hits it, and there are worse things.

25. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance This is basically the opposite of Punisher in that it is ridiculously ambitious and shoots for the moon and misses quite a bit, but it has great action sequences, and Ghost Rider turning a giant digger machine into a Hell-cycle, and Nic Cage and Ciaran Hinds and Idris Elba and Johnny Whitworth having a contest to see who can chew the most scenery. It is insane. And it’s fun. High peaks and extremely deep valleys, to be sure. But it’s never boring.

THE ONES THAT ARE FUN AND NOT A WASTE OF TIME BUT MAYBE NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO BE CALLED “GOOD” YET

24. Thor: The Dark World It is relentlessly entertaining. This is the one that was hardest for me to rank, probably because on the one hand it is the Marvel film I enjoyed terrifically while watching and then later, on sober second thought when the adrenalin of the experience was gone, thought “hmmm” – because enjoyment of the film helps one forget that the villain is bland and the magical McGuffin is meaningless and the plot just a series of excuses to have Loki do neato things and the film’s gender politics are just plain bad (especially after the first Thor was so good in this regard). And then I watched it again and it was still very entertaining. But it still bugs me.

23. X-Men: First Class There’s a lot of silly bits in here and a lot of things you can quibble over or complain about (how it instantly becomes Team Whitebread as the good guys, how the guy whose power is “don’t get killed” IS LITERALLY THE FIRST ONE WHO DIES, Jennifer Lawrence being underwhelming, January Jones being completely awful at everything she does, etc.) but the gorgeous sense of design, skilled direction by Matthew Vaughn, and the stupidly good performances of James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are what make this watchable.

22. Doctor Strange Personal biases would probably make me rank this higher, but honesty demands that this is where it lands because its major flaw is that it doesn’t really nail Strange’s character well until the end, and his journey to that point is unsatisfying in terms of character arc. Basically it serves its purpose as a way to integrate Doc into the MCU proper (as Strange’s appearance in Thor: Ragnarok is excellent), and it’s visually imaginative and every performance is basically good. But it’s not really anything more than that.

21. X-Men Deserves credit for inspiring the new wave of superhero movies in the first place, and beyond that it holds up surprisingly well. A nice balance between nerd callouts and easy access for newbs, well-directed by Bryan Singer with tight editing and gorgeous cinematography, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is still a revelation and the script balances pathos, action and moments of comedy quite well. It still has numerous weak spots (Halle Berry, and also Halle Berry), and the pacing is definitely askew much of the time, but it’s amazing how much this film got right on what was more or less the first try when so many others failed when they had examples of what worked and what didn’t.

THE ONES THAT ARE GOOD

20. Iron Man Let’s be honest: the third act of this film is at best a hot mess and at worst confused sludge, and we all forgive it that, because RDJ kickstarted the Modern Marvel Movie Movement ™ and because you get to see Jeff Bridges’ performance as The Dude Except Now He’s Evil (IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!) and because the first two-thirds of the film are just about perfect, so we let it limp to the finish and nobody really complains. But its strengths as a film have largely been eclipsed by second- and third-generation Marvel fare at this point. It’s still good, but there’s so much now that is better.

19. Ant-Man Gets by on a mostly paper-thin plot by relying on clever visual gags, much more storytelling flair than most Marvel movies have, and a set of really winning performances from Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas and Michael Pena, and Evangeline Lilly is allowed to stay within her range and is fine. Has a weak ending (Scott Lang can reverse being stuck in the unescapable quantum thingerdoo because of The Power of Love, I guess?), and the Bobby Cannavale character and his subplot just actively gets in the way of the movie (there is literally nothing he does that wouldn’t work better being done by Judy Greer’s ex-wife character instead, but she’s a lady person so of course we need a dude to be a minor antagonist) but this one is just gently funny all the way through.

18. Spider-Man The general lack of Spider-jokes (other than the inspired “go web!” sequence) is a shame, but other than that Spider-Man is an exceptionally well-crafted film in just about every respect. If, tonally, it is not quite accurate to its source material, that is forgivable given the impressiveness of its visual skill (Sam Raimi spent a decade making these films and it was time well spent), its strong story, fine performances from Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and Willem Dafoe, and excellent special effects (which he would improve upon in the sequel, but even so). But at this point, that level of craft is just the minimum standard to be expected.

17. X2 Everybody understands that this sequel is simply superior throughout to the original; bigger stakes, mostly superior performances (Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler and Brian Cox’ Stryker are standouts, but this is also Famke Janssen’s best work in the franchise and Ian McKellen is at the height of his powers as Magneto), and by this point Bryan Singer was developing his previous visual flair into a sense of craft that results in a film that is just endlessly watchable. Everything about this is good and nothing is bad.

16. Deadpool It’s extremely funny, but in between a quarter and a third of the jokes are of the not-funny-on-a-second-viewing variety, which is a little disappointing. And the action is mostly just sorta okay rather than the holy-crap-ninjas-on-acid-experience one would ideally want out of a Deadpool movie. Still, it’s intelligent, has faith in both its audience and courage in its core concept, and really just goes for that R rating in a way you have to admire on multiple levels.

15. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 Others have noted that there’s a really solid sentimental core to this film, about surviving abuse and coming to terms with one’s abusers, which is sort of remarkable for a superhero-aliens movie. That’s true. It has a lovely ending, too, and Kurt Russell’s Ego is a terrific villain, and all of the Guardians performers who were good in the first one are just as good in this one. That having been said, that stupid manifestation of Pac-Man at the movie’s action climax is so goddamned annoying it makes me knock it down a bunch of ranks. It’s just that bad.

THE ONES THAT ARE VERY GOOD

14. Thor: Ragnarok Super-entertaining joyfluff, with nary a bad performance to be seen and gorgeous visuals and score throughout. It’s efferevescent and lightless, and the reason it doesn’t make my top ten is precisely because of that. There’s not enough weight to it. Hela is a villain for the sake of needing a villain in the story: there’s no reason for her to be so evil, she just is because the story needs a baddie. There’s no definitive scene, either, no one scene that makes you say “oh, yes, this is the mission statement for this movie, distilled down into maybe ninety seconds that makes you understand why you made it.” And this all sounds like I hate it, and I don’t, I love this film, I love its craft, I love all of the jokes, I love everything about it. But there should have been more.

13. X-Men: Days of Future Past This one doesn’t really have an emotional core in the way that some of the other high-ranked films do, but it’s just about perfect as a distillation of a comic book movie. Superheroes, dystopic futures, time travel, alternate timelines, talking to variant versions of yourself: this one goes harder on comic-book concepts than just about any other superhero movie period, and it nails the dismount spectacularly. Great performances (the best of the Fassbender/McAvoy X-flicks by far for that cast, plus Jackman and P-Stew et al), rock-solid direction, and enough nerd shit that it was likely shat out by a veritable herd of nerd cows.

12. Spider-Man: Homecoming This is probably the best Spider-Man movie ever made. (Spider-Man 2 is a better movie overall, but you have to admit that it is also a superhero movie about a guy who looks a lot like Spider-Man rather than a Spider-Man movie proper, because the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man loses so much of what makes Spidey Spidey.) Earns points for not retelling the origin story again, for one of the best Marvel villains in Michael Keaton’s Vulture, for a lot of comedy that works extremely well. Loses points for a supposed Modern Teens Dance playing 80s songs, though.

11. Iron Man 3 Many have said that Iron Man 3 feels like a Shane Black movie that happens to be a Marvel movie, rather than a Marvel movie that happens to be directed by Shane Black – including myself, previously – but at this point after other directors have had the chance to really stretch the Marvel movie formula to fit their own personal styles that comment feels less accurate. That said, it is still smart and clever (recognizing that Movie Tony can’t really work as an alcoholic and substituting PTSD for it was particularly brilliant) and at times barely feels like a superhero movie at all. Of course, that is a bit of a problem because it is a superhero movie, or at least intended to be. But only a bit of a problem.

10. Captain America: Civil War It is overly long and does suffer somewhat from story creep because it is both, at once, the third Captain America movie but also the second-and-a-halfish Avengers movie. But, beyond that, there is very little to complain about with this movie, which manages to combine an effects-driven blockbuster with a character-driven conflict story and it all mostly works, far more elegantly than it realistically should be able to manage, juggling so many balls in the air and never really dropping any of them, with several set-pieces that are all-timers in the Marvel canon and one of the absolute best villains in any Marvel movie, regardless of MCU or not.

9. Guardians of the Galaxy This is a true story: a comics professional with deep connections throughout the industry told me, confidently, about eight months before Guardians came out that Marvel had mostly given up on it being a potential franchise, in large part because the original corporate motivation for it was to have a “space franchise” for Marvel to compete with Star Wars – and then Disney bought Star Wars, and Guardians was considered an ill-fated stepchild that the studio was prepared to give up on. And then the trailer (still one of the truly great trailers) hit and Rocket Raccoon was shooting people with his laser gun and the movie made a bajillion dollars, because audiences recognized a movie that knew itself and what it wanted to be: a rollicking space adventure comedy that understood not only that a raccoon with a laser gun was great, but that a movie where a raccoon had a laser gun had to both embrace its absurdity but also not let that absurdity define it.

8. Thor As time progresses I periodically return to this one and I think, more and more, it is one of the most underappreciated Marvel movies. Probably the most. Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean direction works so fluidly with the characters and the story. The jokes almost wholly land perfectly: Chris Hemsworth demonstrated here for the first time his cheerful willingness to make Thor look like a lovable dope, and certainly in movies following they’ve been willing to take that further but he gets so much credit for getting the ball rolling. The “asshole learns to be a good person” story arc feels earned here in a way that it doesn’t in many other superhero flicks. And it’s colorful and bright, an outlier in that regard for Marvel films of the time when their preferred digital cameras tended to mute color palettes (thank god they’ve corrected course there).

7. Blade If X-Men is responsible for the modern superhero movie, we have to give Blade credit for making Hollywood think that Marvel Comics was something that could be exploited in the first place. But Blade is more than that; it is in its own right an amazing action/horror picture, just about flawless in every respect – the sort of B-movie that filmmakers imitate endlessly (and have done). There is simply nothing Blade does wrong.

6. The Avengers Now, if you want to point to things The Avengers does wrong – the lighting for many of the interior shots is insipid at best and cheap-looking at worst (Joss Whedon may not have been the cinematographer but it seems he wanted it to look like boring TV), the primary arc of the movie really is just a Cap/Iron Man buddy story, Thor doesn’t get enough dialogue, the Hulk reveal doesn’t make sense really, and the Thanos end-reveal is nerdwank of the highest order. But, on the other hand, they successfully made a superhero team movie of epic scale, the Battle of New York is probably the best long-form action sequence on film since the end of Hard Boiled, it doesn’t sag and it’s never boring. When we talk about movies being ambitious, it is worth remembering that Avengers was attempting to do something that had never been done, was by all accounts almost impossible to manage, and almost entirely pulled it off.

THE ONES THAT ARE GREAT

5. Spider-Man 2 Ebert’s favorite superhero movie and justifiably so: this is the height of Sam Raimi’s creative vision. Just watch any of the Spidey/Ock fights; they are simply perfect filmmaking. The balance between action and drama is expertly maintained. Alfred Molina’s performance is staggeringly good. I could say so many more things but they would all be superlatives.

4. Captain America: The First Avenger As Iron Man 3 is recognizably a Shane Black movie, so is Captain America recognizably a Joe Johnston movie; the lush colour palette Johnston utilized in The Rocketeer is present, as is Johnston’s well-documented love of homaging old Republic serials. But what makes Captain America so good is the emotional notes of regret and loss that are omnipresent throughout the film: despite being a superhero movie, this is a film whose core emotion is sadness, and that feeling hits at every beat of the movie, most notably in Chris Evans’ magnificent performance as Cap – he’s not as showy as RDJ’s Iron Man is, but I think it’s a more fully realized performance on the whole. The overall effect is to make the film slightly downbeat (which I think hurt it) but it also feels more mature and adult.

3. Captain America: The Winter SoldierWinter Soldier is even better than the other Cap movies, taking numerous visual cues from 1970s conspiracy thrillers in service of a taut, engaging story about government overreach which would fuel a lot of further Marvel flicks. This is a film that has the narrative confidence to simply skip a difficult and exciting heist because it needs to put the time elsewhere, a film that doesn’t bother explaining its tropes because it trusts the audience not to be stupid, a film that doesn’t feel the need to justify Arnim Zola as a living bank of computers or how Falcon’s jetpack works, but just shoves it out there immediately. This is the Marvel movie in maturity, and it feels so good to see it.

THE ONES THAT AREN’T JUST GREAT FOR MARVEL MOVIES BUT GREAT FOR ALL FILMS PERIOD

2. Black Panther Action filmmaking more realized than just about any other Marvel film so far, in service of a story that is, when you get down to it, about dueling philosophies of Black liberation (except that the dueling philosophies are embodied in people who are actually fighting each other), with stunning visuals, an intense score and soundtrack both, and performances that go beyond the usual rock-solidity that you get in Marvel movies and often hit near-profundity in their excellence. Plus all of the jokes work. It is amazing that this was made; it is beyond amazing how perfect an action film it manages to be.

1. Logan I keep coming back to that one scene where Logan, after burying Xavier, just starts attacking his truck with a tree branch until he collapses in rage and exhaustion, because it’s not cool Wolverine Berserker Rage ™ that he’s doing in that scene, it’s tired-old-man-who’s-furious-at-the-world-rage, in a movie where the moral is about how violence corrodes everybody and how it inevitably poisons your soul. They did that in a superhero movie. They also dealt, both matter-of-factly and fantastically, with the horror of coping with Alzheimer’s and senility – both as a patient and a caregiver. This movie is just so utterly unconcerned with being cool most of the time, in a way that makes it matter more than any Marvel movie so far.

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http://mightygodking.com/2018/03/02/its-my-own-fault-for-installing-wordpress/#commentsFri, 02 Mar 2018 17:56:44 +0000http://mightygodking.com/?p=10549“CLARISSA”: Hi! I saw your blog mightgodkingdotcom and we think it’s great! We’d like to open up a dialogue where you would host a sponsored post about HOT AIR BALLONS. Do you think your readers would be interested in HOT AIR BALLONS? We would of course be willing to compensate you for hosting the sponsored post in the amount of twenty-five dollars. Please respond!MGK:*deletes email*

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“HARRY”: Hi, I make infographics, and in order to get more exposure I’d like to ask you to post my infographic! It’s about Black Panther! Looking at your blog I bet your readers would like an infographic about Black Panther!MGK:*huh, this one seems targeted, at least, let’s look at it*INFOGRAPHIC: Black Panther’ is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character was created by writer-editor Stan Lee and writer-artist Jack Kirby, first appearing in Fantastic Four #52 (July 1966) in the Silver Age of Comic Books. Black Panther’s real name is T’Challa, king and protector of the fictional African nation called Wakanda. Along with possessing enhanced abilities achieved through ancient Wakandan rituals of drinking the heart shaped herb, T’Challa also relies on his proficiency in science, rigorous physical training, hand-to-hand combat skills, and access to wealth and advanced technology to combat his enemies. Black Panther is the first superhero of African descent in mainstream American comics, having debuted years before early African American superheroes such as Marvel Comics’ the Falcon (1969) and Luke Cage (1972) or DC Comics’ John Stewart in the role of Green Lantern (1971). The Black Panther storyline which ran through thirteen issues of the Jungle Action series (numbers six through eighteen) is considered to be Marvel Comics’ first graphic novel.MGK: This is literally just the first two paragraphs of the Black Panther entry from Wikipedia combined with some stolen artwork.“HARRY”: You don’t even have to post it yourself! Here’s an embedded link that you can copy and paste! We’ll compensate you if you do!MGK: This is obviously a link to a phishing site.“HARRY”: But I know what you really want to ask, and yes, we will compensate you!MGK:*deletes email*

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“CLARISSA”: Hi, Mighty Go King! I’m following up on my previous email about you hosting our sponsored post about HOT AIR BALLONS. I don’t want you to miss out on this opportunity!MGK:*deletes email*

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“GEORGE SCHMIDT”: hello I am an aspiring freelance writer and I would like to post on mightygodking dot com and i would like to send you a sampleMGK:*continues reading out of curiosity*“GEORGE SCHMIDT”: this sample is about polo shirts, i will pay you ten dollars if you post it for meMGK:*deletes email*

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“CLARISSA”: Hello again! I didn’t hear back from you about out HOT AIR BALLONS proposal so –MGK:*deletes email*

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“MARK: I came across your blog site while looking for resources for our next blog and I knew I had to reach out immediately, kudos on a fantastic blog. My name is Mark and I do blogs for an online blogging company. Do you accept sponsored blogs? Is this something you would like to blog about? Blog you later!MGK:*deletes email*

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“LORI”: Would your readers be interested in entering into a contest where they could win fantastic prizes like quality undergarments! I bet they would, and all you have to do is host one sponsored blog post. Unlike all those other scammers offering sponsored content, we pay up front, and our contest is real. Don’t you owe it to your readers? Wouldn’t they be excited by a chance to win free undergarments, or purchase undergarments at a discount? I’m sure this will excite your readership and drive up your social media metrics!MGK:*deletes email*

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“CLARISSA”: Hello once more! I still haven’t heard back from you about our HOT AIR BALLONS blog proposal. I have been authorized to up our sponsorship offer to fifty dollars and I’m letting our network of blog contacts know about this excellent opportunity!MGK:*furiously typing* You haven’t heard back from me because you are a waste of energy. Nigerian scammers have more fucking style from you. Me ignoring your seven other emails isn’t an invitation to send more, it’s me saying “fuck off” as politely as possible, and you’re not taking the hint. You are literally the embodiment of every commercial sentiment that makes the internet worse with every passing second that you exist. Nobody wants to read your shitty advertorial about ballooning. Nobody will ever read it. You are just creating a sea of endless chaff making it so much harder to get to the wheat that we all want. So, please, just fuck off. Also, “balloons” has two “Os.”

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“CLARISSA”: Thanks for your feedback on my previous email! Obviously you are not interested in HOT AIR BALLOONS content. However, I note from your email that you appear to be interested in FARMING content. Would this be more to your liking? Let me know! For FARMING content we can offer one hundred dollars per post!

Welcome to the results of the 2017 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

This year we had 532 voters participating. As always, for next year we encourage all of you wrestling media people to nominate yourselves and your favorites, and try to get your fans out to vote for you. Fair is fair!

As always, thank yous to Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

This is the Call for Votes for the 2017 RSPW (Theszie) Awards. You can vote here.

The Theszies are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash of the Champions XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into menus to make voting faster and easier (since the menus should include most or all of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves. We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination, as well as culling the nominations somewhat to make the ballot more manageable.

Remember, though: if your candidate for an award isn’t nominated, you can always write him in.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2016.

The deadline for entering votes is February 10, 2017. Have fun!

]]>http://mightygodking.com/2018/01/13/the-2017-rspw-awards-the-theszies-call-for-votes/feed/1MGK’s Top Ten Movies of 2017http://mightygodking.com/2018/01/03/mgks-top-ten-movies-of-2017/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mgks-top-ten-movies-of-2017
http://mightygodking.com/2018/01/03/mgks-top-ten-movies-of-2017/#commentsWed, 03 Jan 2018 17:51:41 +0000http://mightygodking.com/?p=1040110.) John Wick Chapter 2. Here is the interesting thing about John Wick 2: it is, fairly blatantly, a critique of capitalism. John Wick is imprisoned in an economic system with rules designed to benefit the powerful and all he really wants to do is not be a part of it any more, but when he negotiates his exit it turns out there’s a catch (there’s always a catch) and the catch is that he has to do the bidding of a power broker “one last time,” except that he knows that it’s never one last time because the last time was supposed to be the one last time, and when he takes action against that power broker, his supposed friend – another power broker in the system – “reluctantly” brings the entire system to bear against him. It’s honestly kind of brilliant, and on top of that it’s also a balls-to-the-wall action movie, even better than the first one was, and the first one was pretty damn good. (Now, if they’d only start using decent subtitles in these movies instead of the drama queen shit they instead use for some reason.) My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

9.) Logan. Comic nerds so often express the wish for a film version of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, which is not surprising because that story is basically about the denial of old age: Batman can solve everything, even getting older! Logan is subversive because it turns everything about superhero story on its ear: it straight-up tells you that aging sucks, and not everybody gets a happy ending, and that the world is getting steadily worse, but it doesn’t do this in some sort of boring gothy way where the movie takes pleasure in telling you “stuff is bad” but rather goes matter-of-fact about it in a way that superhero movies just don’t do. Logan having a tantrum and trying to beat up a car with a tree branch in a fit of rage – not cool Wolverine berserker rage, but shitty tired old-man rage – is one of the great scenes of the year. And, even with all of that, it finds its peace with these terrible truths. It’s a hell of a thing. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

8.) Get Out. Many, many people who are smarter about movies than me have written much, much more that is smart about Get Out already and I am not the one to explain how it brilliantly combines racial politics with body horror in a way that is completely compelling and immediately empathetic. I just wanna say how smart it is that at one point, the hero literally escapes from the clutches of his captors by picking cotton, because that’s a brilliant metaphorical inversion, and that the entire movie is filled with smart details like that in service of a story that’s both intelligent and affecting. And scary. Damn is it scary. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

7.) Okja. If Bong Joon-Ho’s previous film Snowpiercer is a critique of capitalism, then Okja is a critique of capitalists themselves, and this is a fine distinction; the movie practically admires one of the two sisters Tilda Swinton plays because she is amoral and can thus be dealt with expeditiously, whereas the other has distinct beliefs about how she both wants to be rich and wants to be morally in the right. This extends to the protestors who are ostensibly on the side of the good guys in this movie: Paul Dano speechifies at length about the need for nonviolence, but then fucks up Steven Yeun’s shit when he finds out that Yeun has (in some way) betrayed him. Nobody in this movie is perfect, except of course for Okja and her kin, because they are adorable. More than most movies on this list, Okja isn’t entirely sure what it is, but it’s that aimlessness that allows it to say so much about so many things. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

6.) I, Tonya. The single funniest movie I have seen this year and possibly the darkest as well, I, Tonya manages to find comedy (and a lot of comedy) in a series of viciously abusive relationships and not be tasteless about that, which is sort of amazing. It uses fourth wall-breaking and interview cutaway gags to maximum effect, creating a story that is intentionally meta all the way through to get you through the violence and discuss both a career and a scandal in detail. It only stops being funny when it takes a moment to be devastating, and those moments come quickly and with only enough warning so you aren’t still snickering when the freight train hits you. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

5.) The Florida Project. Most movies that are about childhood don’t remember that children are hilarious but also often just little shits. Most movies that are about poverty don’t remember that although poverty sucks, everybody has happy moments to which they cling. The Florida Project understands both of these truths completely and many more besides, making it the best film about being a poor child in living memory, with a cast mostly comprised of young, new and untrained actors to boot – the cops are real cops, the social workers are real social workers, and Willem Dafoe is… well, Willem Dafoe, he’s always great in everything, but it’s so nice to see Willem Dafoe get to just be a friendly, considerate person instead of a guy who screams at the camera for dramatic effect while gunfire happens at other points in the movie. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

4.) Columbus. Two-character movies (and although there are a couple of other characters in this, Columbus is about John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson, and they dominate 90 percent of all screen time together) are a tightrope of a thing: the two characters have to be likeable but not cloying, layered but not inscrutable, interesting but not so much that their inner lives become frenetic. These two characters pair together better than any pas-de-deux since the Before trilogy – the entire movie is in their hands and they do not fumble it, not once, and you expect John Cho to be good but he’s amazing, and Haley Lu Richardson is a revelation – and their conversations and the story are accentuated by Kogonada’s shot choices, which are some of the most beautiful and striking tableaux I’ve seen set to film in a long time. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

3.) The Big Sick. Here is the thing about serious medical crises that nobody will tell you: when you’re in one, you have to laugh or you’ll collapse. That sense is what permeates The Big Sick – the characters at all point have to laugh, because the stresses being placed on them are unimaginable, and I’m not just talking about the medical crisis that is the heart of the film’s plot but also the expectations of growing up as a member of an immigrant family or the realization that you’ve potentially fucked up the most important thing in your life. What The Big Sick does is invite the audience to laugh with the characters, because what else are you gonna do? And that’s pretty special, a warmhearted gesture from a film that feels like a real hug from family – comforting, but filled with complex associations as well. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

2.) Lady Bird. It’s probably a little banal at this point to agree with the chorus of people saying “this is what high school was like for me” – in part because it’s just under a decade off for me to really say “this is what high school was like.” I mean, we didn’t even have the Dave Matthews Band yet. Also, I was never a high school girl, and this is most definitely a movie about being a high school girl. That having been said, though, yes, the film feels like high school in a way that so many films don’t: it captures that synthesis of feeling awkward and cool at the same time, recognizes the desperation of wanting to find your own individual identity and the conflict of also wanting at the same time the comforts to which you’re accustomed, and understands that wanting to grow up isn’t the same thing as growing up while also understanding that ultimately, you do both of them at the same time. Also, Laurie Metcalf deserves ALL THE AWARDS. I AM NOT KIDDING ABOUT THIS. I WILL BURN SHIT DOWN, HOLLYWOOD. My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

1.) A Taxi Driver. My favorite movie in 2014 was Pride (and it is still one of my favorites and always makes me cry a little), because Pride is a movie about ordinary people coming together in the face of oppression, and so is this, but this one is so much more of everything than Pride was – as much as I love that story and that movie, it’s still at its heart a Plucky Working-Class Brits Do A Thing! movie. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that genre, but.) A Taxi Driver is both a comedy and a drama, but it’s about the most vicious and violent form of government oppression rather than the slow-motion assault on the working class or the attacks on the dignity of minorities, and thus everything about it is more intense than Pride was – and also because whereas in Pride the conflict in the story is between natural allies who have to learn to accept one another, in A Taxi Driver the conflict is internal, about an everyman who has to overcome his own fears and selfish impulses to recognize his true responsibilities as a citizen, and that’s honestly even more universal than Pride was, and that makes all the difference between the two. (Plus, Song Kang-Ho is probably one of the ten best actors working on the planet today, so that helps.) My Letterboxd notes on it are here.

STILL HAVE TO SEE:Call Me By Your Name, The Post, Coco, Brigsby Bear, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.

]]>http://mightygodking.com/2018/01/03/mgks-top-ten-movies-of-2017/feed/10You fucking nerdshttp://mightygodking.com/2017/12/22/you-fucking-nerds/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=you-fucking-nerds
http://mightygodking.com/2017/12/22/you-fucking-nerds/#commentsFri, 22 Dec 2017 14:00:45 +0000http://mightygodking.com/?p=10389WARNING: this post has lots of spoilers in it for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. You cannot escape them if you continue reading.

Okay. So I say this as someone who saw The Last Jedi (and my review is here, for those so inclined): I liked it a lot, but I do think there are some flaws in the execution. There’s definitely some fridge logic issues in the “fleet” half of the movie, the Canto Bight sequences are overlong and I think complaints about them feeling “prequelly” are valid because they don’t feel grounded like most of the rest of the movie, and I didn’t like Benicio Del Toro’s performance much at all. But it’s still, mostly, a very good Star Wars movie, and for me it is the only one other than possibly Rogue One that really stands up beside the original trilogy.

And then I saw this fucking thing. If you can make it more than three or four minutes before pausing and saying “no, fuck this,” you impress me. I had to skip forward quite a bit to get through it at all.

First off, I want to douse every one of these four nerds with lye and hose them down. They make me feel icky just watching them. I feel like watching them made me a worse person by default. They are all terrible and should not be allowed to have fun toys. (They can keep their Phasma helmet and their Kylo Ren helmet. Those are not fun toys.)

But mostly, their annoying fanboy gripes (and I will admit a couple of them have a bit of a point, but only a couple) are all that’s awful about fandom in general and a lot of Star Wars fandom in specific, so I want to try to address most of their major complaints in the video, because most of their complaints are stupid.

1. The movie doesn’t really explain why the Resistance is on the run now after the events of the first movie. This is actually, let’s be honest, one of their better gripes; the first film doesn’t explain the interstellar political situation clearly and this one is too busy to get the chance. Force Awakens, in retrospect, needed just a couple of minutes to properly explain it.

BUT: these are supposedly Major Star Wars Fans Who Buy All The Star Wars Shit, as evidenced by the piles of it prominently on display in the video. And thus, they should be aware that the explanation exists – it’s in the (canon) tie-in prequel novels and the (canon) novelization. Basically, the Republic has a “no standing military” rule in place, to prevent the rise of an new Palpatine. However, when the First Order (which is the remnants of the Empire, which retreated to some core territories and licked their wounds before re-establishing their fleets and kidnapping children by the thousands and brainwashing them into becoming Stormtroopers) began expanding once again, Leia and some other Rebellion veterans said “we need something to counter the First Order,” and the result was that the Republic secretly funded the Resistance for plausible deniability reasons, which means that the Resistance was smaller than the First Order (as always) but at least had a few fleets’ worth of frigates, carriers and fighters. Unfortunately, most of the Resistance’s forces were (not unreasonably) hanging out in the Republic’s core systems when those systems were destroyed by Starkiller Base in Force Awakens, which is why the Resistance had to attack Starkiller Base with, what, a couple dozen fighters? Because that is what was left. And in Last Jedi the remnants of the Resistance (who took even more losses during the Starkiller battle) are running away, because yeah, Starkiller is gone, but the First Order still has the most important element of any evil space arsenal in Star Wars, which is lots of big ships shaped like triangles.

I didn’t even read those books and I know this basically via fan osmosis. It’s not really reasonable for such Major Star Wars Fans to not know this stuff. But it’s at least a reasonable complaint vis-a-vis the movies. It’s one of maybe two or three.

2. Why did Luke leave a map to find him if he came to the island planet to die? Because when he left he still maybe thought some day he might want to be needed, and then ten or fifteen years of him being alone on the island made him change his mind? Or maybe he just left Leia the map because maybe some day she might want to see him again? Brothers do things for their sisters, you know. It doesn’t just have to be at the turn of the tide, at the third morning’s dawn, et cetera.

3. Why did Luke milk that thing? Why did he drink it? Luke is A) a farmboy B) a hermit. These are literally the two professions where you are most likely to milk a thing and then drink the milk.

4. Leia should have died in space! Leia has at least some Jedi training and the Force is powerful. Seriously, you can accept “firing lightning from your hands” but not “being able to stave off vacuum death for about a minute”? Never mind that this sort of power would seem directly related to the concept of Force hibernation, which is a thing which has shown up in both Clone Wars miniseries as well as many other less-canon sources. And it’s not like she’s fine afterwards; they have to hustle her into a medical bed immediately in order for her to have a chance to survive.

5. Phasma’s death was lame. So was her death in the first movie. Oh, wait, you didn’t see her die in the first movie? Well, you didn’t see her die in this one either. She fell through a fireball; if she can survive Starkiller Base exploding she can survive a lousy fireball. And, if Phasma is in fact dead, so what? I mean, sure, I love Gwendoline Christie too (seriously, someone cast her in a romcom, it can be a romcom about Shit Tall Women Have To Deal With), but let’s be honest, Phasma is the Boba Fett of this trilogy, and Boba Fett is most remembered for A) successfully tracking the Millennium Falcon one time and B) being overrated as shit because he’s not really any good despite his awesome reputation. The movie’s quality does not hang on Phasma, just as Boba Fett dying by having his jetpack accidentally set off by a blind Han Solo in Jedi didn’t make that movie bad either. (The awful video nerds even have to admit this.) Phasma is not a character in these movies: she is an obstacle that happens to have Gwendoline Christie’s lovely voice attached to it.

6. We don’t get to find out who Snoke is. I can kinda see this as a reasonable complaint, because Snoke was a cool bad guy and you want to know more about cool bad guys. But, at the same time: he was clearly not important to the overall story Rian Johnson and Team Star Wars want to tell, and obviously not as important as (say) Kylo Ren. Besides which, we know almost as much of Snoke at this point as we did of Palpatine after three movies; you’re going back and adding details you learned in the prequels to compare the two. Yes, I too would have liked some more minutiae about Snoke, but the movie was already too long and if anything more needed to be cut from it. Snoke’s story isn’t important to the movie, because his story isn’t the movie’s story, just like Phasma’s wasn’t either.

7. Rey has all these abilities before she even gets trained and now she’s awesome with a lightsaber before Luke even trains her and – Oh, this again? Look, this is simple: Kylo, in Force Awakens, probes Rey’s mind telepathically without guarding himself because he has no idea she’s Force-capable. When he opens the door to her mind it opens both ways, and she accidentally accesses/absorbs the knowledge of how to do some Jedi things – Force hypnosis, telekinesis, fighting with a lightsaber, and so forth. (And really, it’s established fairly early in Awakens that Rey has had to become pretty good at fighting with a staff in order to survive on Jakku, so she probably didn’t have to learn that much about fighting with a lightsaber.)

8. The Finn/Rose plot sucks. I agree that the Canto Bight sequence needed better editing and that the space-horse stampede sequence probably could mostly have been cut out and it would make the movie flow better, and that the shots inside the casino feel ungrounded as compared to just about every other shot in the movie and thus feel vaguely “prequelly,” but that’s not the same as it sucking. Canto Bight establishes the entire reason the First Order are evil – not just because they blow up planets, but because they create oppressive, cruel systems that abuse the many for the sake of the few. It explains why Finn’s solution of simply fleeing can’t work and isn’t right, and it situates the Resistance (and the Rebellion) firmly on the side of truth and justice, which is where they should be, instead of just making them one of two sides (as Benicio Del Toro’s codebreaker guy suggests).

9. Rey’s parents are nobody special. And this is where they completely reveal that they just don’t get it, because the reveal of Rey’s parentage is perfect and the best possible answer to the question they could have chosen. If Rey is a Skywalker or indeed related to any major Star Wars character from the original trilogy, then that would have reinforced that the Star Wars saga is and always will be about the Skywalkers and their friends/relations; it reduces a universe down to a family, and enforces the horribly Campbellian ideal that Chosen Ones are a thing rather than a pernicious story trope that reinforces classism and apathy in the real world. Rey’s parents being nobody is the moral of the entire story, the one Luke keeps trying to hit you over the head with: the Jedi weren’t special, the Skywalkers aren’t special, the Sith aren’t special. The Force is for everybody, and everybody matters. The universe (both ours and the Star Warsy one) is not divided into heroes and lookers-on; anybody can be a hero, even if your parents were junk dealers who sold you for drinking money because they didn’t care about you. When Kylo tries to convince Rey to turn by implying that she matters because he cares about her, that’s the Dark Side talking, the last remaining Skywalker telling you that only Skywalkers and those Skywalkers deem important count for anything. And he’s wrong, which is why she then duels him.

About halfway through the video, one of the nerds whines that Lucasfilm/Disney “coulda given us what we wanted.” And it’s true, they could have made a movie which pandered desperately to every nerd fetish. But The Last Jedi is, instead, an actual good movie, and not just a good Star Wars, and that’s pretty great. Anyway, that’s all the Star Wars from me for now, until JJ Abrams asks me to resolve the issue of what to do with Leia in Episode IX, which yes I have already figured out.

EDIT TO ADD: Since people have asked, here is a ROT13-encoded answer re: what do to with Leia in Episode IX.

To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by December 31, 2017.

Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2016, here for 2015, here for 2014, here for 2013, here and here for 2012, and here for most historical awards.

]]>http://mightygodking.com/2017/12/13/call-for-nominations-the-2017-theszies-rspw-awards/feed/4Mastodon, Twitter, and you (or not you)http://mightygodking.com/2017/11/16/mastodon-twitter-and-you-or-not-you/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mastodon-twitter-and-you-or-not-you
http://mightygodking.com/2017/11/16/mastodon-twitter-and-you-or-not-you/#commentsThu, 16 Nov 2017 14:00:17 +0000http://mightygodking.com/?p=10311Mastodon has seen one of its periodic growth spurts over the last week as a bunch of left-leaning sorts finally decided they had had enough of Twitter’s awful moderation policies and the not-ignorable possibility that it might be run by people at least a little sympathetic to Nazis. This is the most recent growth spurt Mastodon has had since, well, the last time people decided they had had enough of Twitter’s awful moderation policies, which was when I personally signed up on mastodon dot social (mightygodking, of course, because whatever my other sins may be I resolutely remain on-brand). And I tried it out for a while, and I went back to Twitter. I’m back on Mastodon again now, mostly because people I like are trying to use it again and I want to see what they say.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Partially, of course, there is the issue that social media, for many people – including myself – only really has value once it obtains a certain level of critical mass. Twitter has that; Facebook has it; Instagram has it. Mastodon does not, not yet. The largest Mastodon instances are about 100k-150k strong, except they’re Japanese instances mostly dedicated to sharing lolicon so they’re not really emblematic of how big Mastodon is generally. Dot social, at around 110K users, appears to be the biggest instance whose growth is not primarily driven by Japanese not-quite-technically-child-porn-but-close. This sounds respectably large, except that not all of those users are active by a long shot; plenty of those accounts are people who migrated once, got an account, and then went quiet because they decided not to use the service. I mean, Ello has over 1.5 million registered accounts and it’s not exactly thriving. And then you hit the issue of people who have multiple Mastodon accounts on different Mastodon instances (which is where the service starts to hit headache levels for me).

But there are other reasons than lack of critical mass, I think, that Mastodon does not provide a lot of Twitter exiles with what they want. Let’s be honest; what Twitter users annoyed with Twitter mostly want is Twitter except with better harassment policies and no Nazis, and Mastodon at first gave the illusion of offering this (the fact that the basic Mastodon homepage looks a lot like Tweetdeck and that Mastodon is generally modelled after earlier Twitter builds helped quite a bit in this regard). But, and this is key: Mastodon does not, in fact, offer either of these things. Individual Mastodon instances might offer these things, but the problem with decentralized power structures is that when you need central power to exist in order to stop certain things, decentralized power structures cannot, in fact, do anything to stop those things. Mastodon’s advocates inevitably argue at this point that participating in your chosen instance fixes these problems, because if your local instance bans Nazis, for example, then that solves the Nazi problem. However, this solution only works on the most local of levels.

Here is one fairly obvious abuse vector for Mastodon I have not yet seen a solution for: let us say you have an account on a large, non-controversial instance like dot social. I want to cause you harm, so I steal your avatar and username and replicate it on another instance dedicated to “free speech” (e.g. shitposting) where moderation essentially does not exist, and I know the moderators will not stop me from impersonating you and then penning, say, racist screeds under “your name.” If I am technically adept enough (and the demand of skill here is not impossibly high) I can even go ahead and set up my own instance so now I’m my own moderator and can even use your own moderation requests as an additional vector for abuse.

Twitter’s moderation policies are shit in most regards, but their track record with malicious impersonation is (or at least used to be, although I haven’t seen any complaints about this aspect of it of late) reasonably solid, because it has to be in order to maintain their high-profile corporate clients. But – and if I am wrong about this I would like to be corrected – that seems to me to be a dealbreaker for using Mastodon with any seriousness.

Beyond the abuse issues with decentralization, though, Mastodon’s appeal for me as a social network is limited because it’s more or less intended to be non-expansive by design. That’s really the point of decentralization in the first place: you reduce the amount of abuse by reducing the number of users, so that moderation is not so onerous that it can be handled by a minimum of humanpower. When you consider Mastodon in this light, you realize it’s not really a Twitter replacement so much as it is an update on the private and semi-private forums that dominated internet communication in the early 2000s before Facebook started approaching critical mass. And those were fine then and they’re fine now for what they are, and I take no issue with people who want to retreat to walled gardens or semi-walled gardens for their internet socializing.

But realistically, that’s what Mastodon is. It’s an opportunity to sequester yourself rather than a choice to participate, and I think a lot of people enthusiastically endorsing Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter don’t really appreciate that yet. I’ve been watching the local timelines on several instances and while they’re polite and respectful (because the instances I’ve been visiting are filled with people who are trying to diverge from Twitter because it’s not respectful enough) I do find it definitely less… daring? Seeing people request that other people use the content warning shield for punchlines for their jokes is weird enough on its own – but, more than that, the demand on dot social (and it is, in no uncertain terms, a demand) that people use the content warning shield for discussing politics to any extent is really enough to kill most of my interest in the service; regardless of the expressed sentiment that “it’s all cool, just use the CW,” it still feels unwelcome, and my natural preference is not to transgress and so… yeah. I understand that people can find political discussion unpleasant or even stressful, and I don’t have a problem with them wanting a safe space. But I don’t really want to hang out in that safe space too often even if I am invited. (And I totally understand that this is, in part, because I am a straight white dude and can be comfortable much more easily than average. I mean it when I say I don’t begrudge people wanting a safe space.)

And that isn’t just about my preferences but also muchly about wanting to be exposed to ideas and beliefs other than my own. It was centralization and critical mass which introduced me to Black Twitter, for example, and less frivolously allowed black people to communicate to white people much more directly how they were being abused by police. (The frequently less-than-stellar responses from white people aren’t because of Twitter, at least.) Similarly, it’s good to see and be exposed to, on a regular basis, what people with different belief systems from me think. I might think that they’re stupid, of course, but at least it’s direct knowledge of belief from a primary source and that does matter to me.

In the end, Mastodon’s “federation/instance” jargon is a really terrible way of describing it (one quirk of open source programming is that you inevitably end up using whoever’s terminology sticks first, and this can be either a blessing or a downfall and Mastodon is obviously the latter); one user suggested “galaxy/planet” as a better way of describing it, which is more poetic, but since humanity hasn’t really mastered interstellar travel as of yet I think the appropriate metaphor is “country/cities in, say, the mid-90s.” In 1995, you might live in, oh, Atlanta, and most of the people you know live in Atlanta, but maybe you talk on the phone regularly with your good friend who moved to Philadelphia, and a couple of your college buddies who live in San Francisco, and you get a very incomplete idea of what life is like there as a result. You’re all still Americans, but you’re all inhabiting different subcultures and because of a lack of exposure you don’t get the full picture – and yes, in the “individual forum years” in the early 2000s, the internet still mostly felt like this.

And that’s what Mastodon feels like to me now; it feels like when people move out of the big city to a small town, and explain to you that they love it better in the small town because it’s more relaxing and they don’t have to stress all the time. Which is fine and I’m glad it’s making some people happy – I really am – but it doesn’t appeal to me as it stands. Maybe it’ll change. But right now, I think I’m just gonna check in every so often and see how it’s going.

As others have said, without a picture of the selection from previous ages, it is hard to digest this data. I still recall Blockbuster having an entire aisle to display 100 copies of each of the 3 most popular movies at the time, then 3 aisles holding a random smattering of other stuff. The selection was never all that grand. Anecdotally in my small experience, the selection now just with netflix is way better than in my childhood with blockbuster and two other brick and mortar video store memberships combined.

A few points in response:

1. Blockbusters were, for the most part, terrible video stores, focused as they – and Netflix, for that matter – were on feeding consumer demand for the newest hottest things, rather than being consumer-oriented pay libraries (which are generally profitable enterprises, if not as profitable as stoking consumer demand to hyperactive proportions).

2. Your typical Blockbuster – and I can speak to this as I had multiple siblings work there – worked on stocking principles that dictated that half of the store’s shelf space was devoted to new releases (with the newest and hottest releases taking more prominence, of course), and half to older stock. This contrasted with more traditional video stores, where (and I personally worked at several, so I can also speak to this) generally had a new release/long tail ratio of anywhere from 40-60 (your neighborhood mom and pop store) to 20/80 (the really good video stores that took movies seriously).

3. Compare to Netflix, where we actually have hard statistics to determine how much of their catalogue can be considered recent thanks to sites like New On Netflix. Thanks to that site, I can tell you that Netflix Canada has 5,190 titles right now, and of those 5,190 titles 3,007 are less than three years old. That’s 58 percent! And that’s before you remove TV programs from the equation, because TV series are considered (for search purposes) single titles with their year being the earliest season available on Netflix, so most TV series skew older rather than newer, which means that the percentage of movies on Netflix that could be considered reasonably recent is actually even higher than it looks at first glance.

4. Just as important, though, is the fact that although most video stores and Blockbusters would generally clear out their new releases stock as “previously viewed” sales to increase their revenue, they would keep one or two copies of each new release to be incorporated into their older stock, because although the long tail for rentals is a thing, for movies that are 5-10 years old you’re still in the medium of the long tail where there was an active audience of people who were only getting around to see any given movie which they had intended to see for a while (this happened regularly with prestige pictures/Oscar winners), and after the medium of the long tail passed there was still the long tail of revenue to be generated from movies which had already seen the vast majority of their lifetime rentals but which could earn additional revenue every so often simply by sitting there and being available.

5. The average Blockbuster had a movie library of approximately 7,000 titles at any given time (per Big-Box Swindle by Stacy Mitchell); independent video stores almost always exceeded this, with “good” video stores often exceeding 15,000 titles. Netflix – regardless of country – has at any point a library of in between 5-6,000 titles. That is usually about 20% TV shows (and many of the TV shows are marginal things); it usually also includes about 20% bottom-bin straight-to-DVD releases (and straight-to-video releases were certainly a part of any video store’s inventory, but the ratio was usually about 10% rather than 20%). There really isn’t any numerical question that Netflix’s service is inferior to practically all video stories in terms of variety of catalogue.

So, the basic response to Manatee’s comment is the least satisfying one to all concerned, which is “your memory isn’t really accurate.” Regular video stores were better for catalogue than Blockbuster was, and Blockbuster was better for catalogue than Netflix was.

]]>http://mightygodking.com/2017/10/21/video-stores-were-better-than-netflix/feed/10Why I keep being concerned about the rise of streaming serviceshttp://mightygodking.com/2017/10/18/why-i-keep-being-concerned-about-the-rise-of-streaming-services/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-i-keep-being-concerned-about-the-rise-of-streaming-services
http://mightygodking.com/2017/10/18/why-i-keep-being-concerned-about-the-rise-of-streaming-services/#commentsWed, 18 Oct 2017 13:00:08 +0000http://mightygodking.com/?p=10299People who know me know that I continue to be concerned that the transition to streaming services is actually providing less choice to film viewers rather than more. This is not a new hobby horse I’m riding, of course, but my opinion isn’t changing as time goes on, and the reason was recently illustrated to me all over again.

You may or may not be aware that Edgar Wright, he of Cornetto Trilogy fame and other movies that are mostly good also, last year did a list on Mubi of his thousand favorite films. (Here it is on Letterboxd if you want to clone it for your own Letterboxd. Also I’m on Letterboxd and that’s where my movie reviews and thoughts mostly are these days, mostly because I am finding now that sometimes I don’t remember if I’ve seen a movie from twenty to thirty years ago or not, which is a fun thing to recognize when you’re only 41.) It’s an interesting list. Some people are taking it as a list of One Thousand Great Films, which is stupid because Domino is on it and literally the only good thing about that movie is Keira Knightley saying “my name is Dahmino Hahvey and I am a bounty huntah.” Also it has The Artist on it, and the best thing about that movie is that it ended and then conclusively determined once and for all that the Oscars are a sham. But just because it isn’t necessarily full of movies that are actually good doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting list, curated by someone who really loves movies, and when you’re in the mood to take a deep dive into the movie pool, lists like this are extraordinarily helpful.

So yesterday I was in the mood for such a dive, and I went through the list and found Dark of the Sun, a 1968 action movie about mercenaries in the Congo. (The trailer is here.) The online word about the movie was that it was entertaining and that it had a scene where two guys fight each other with goddamn chainsaws, and I thought that sounded just fine to me, so I went hunting for it.

The problem, of course, is obvious: it isn’t on anything. It’s not on any streaming service in Canada. You can’t virtually rent it on iTunes or Google Play or Windows Media rental or Cineplex.com or even on the Playstation Network’s movie library. (I only occasionally do Google Play rentals and don’t use the other services, but if I wanted to sign up, they aren’t helpful.) There’s a couple of “free movie” streaming sites that advertise it, but I’m pretty sure I have enough malware on my computer already so I’m not doing that. Basically, if I want to see Dark of the Sun based on Edgar Wright’s recommendation and a liking of the idea of a chainsaw duel, I have to track down a copy of the DVD, and I’m not so sure I want to see it that I want to spend $20 on a used DVD (the going price on Amazon.ca’s resellers).

After considering this, I wondered at the rest of the list. It’s not your typical best-of movie list, because this is Edgar Wright’s favorite movies instead, which means there are, among other things, three Russ Meyer films on it. And a lot more horror than average, too, along with a fair dollop of Hong Kong action cinema. And because Wright is English the list skews English more than other lists might, and also has a little more European influence on it, and for films you often don’t see on “best of” lists to boot. And there’s some stuff on it which is simply just average, like the 1973 Burt Reynolds action film White Lightning, but every average action movie has people who love it beyond reason. (Mine is Posse.) All of this, combined with the impressive size of the list, means that Edgar Wright’s list is a reasonably random selection of movies. It biases a little towards certain genres and it’s perhaps a little heavier towards the modern day than it is towards the early years of cinema, proportionally speaking, but it’s a big slice of film that isn’t specific, which means it’s a pretty good sample.

So I took this sample, and asked a simple question: how much of it can I watch online? I set some rules for this. First off, I didn’t count movies illegally streaming on Youtube or on malware-bait movie sites as being online; I only want to count films that I can legally watch online with as clear a conscience as I can manage. “I could torrent it” doesn’t count for the same reason. I also didn’t count movies I could either stream or download by using a VPN to proxy myself into another country, both because it again seems like a violation of the rules and because most streaming and rental services are actively blocking a lot of VPN proxy servers anyways. I then distinguished between movies I could watch via a subscription streaming service in Canada, and movies I could only watch via use of an online rental service like Google Play or iTunes.

Here are the takeways:

Firstly: 223 of Wright’s thousand movies cannot be streamed in Canada in any way whatsoever. No streaming service has them and you can’t rent them at any pay-per-rental/buy-into-your-digital-library service. This includes Dark of the Sun, of course, but also a whole bunch of other titles. Some of the highlights (?) include:

Movie

Why It's Significant

RottenTomatoes

The Passion of Joan of Arc

one of the most critically-praised of all silent films

97%

Un Chien Andalou

Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's silent masterpiece

100%

Monkey Business

one of the best Marx Brothers films

94%

Sons of the Desert

the greatest of all Laurel and Hardy feature films

100%

Fantasia

Disney's orchestral masterpiece

96%

The Bank Dick

W.C. Fields' most popular work

100%

Notorious

Hitchcock directing Cary Grant for the first time

97%

Kind Hearts and Coronets

#6 on the BFI's Top British Films of All Time

100%

Godzilla

it's O.G. – motherfucking original Godzilla

83%

Rififi

the French heist film from which many others copy

94%

Red Desert

Michelangelo Antonioni's most brilliant work with colour

100%

Straw Dogs

the original Peckinpah/Hoffman rather than the remake

91%

Sleeper

Woody Allen's sci-fi comedy

100%

Young Frankenstein

this one not being available blew my mind

93%

Sorcerer

William Friedkin's existential action thriller

80%

Dawn Of The Dead

you can watch Zach Snyder's remake but not Romero's original

93%

All That Jazz

Bob Fosse's filmic masterpiece

85%

A Better Tomorrow

the reason John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat had careers

93%

Near Dark

Kathryn Bigelow's amazing vampire flick

88%

Withnail and I

Richard E. Grant was never better than in this

93%

Crimes and Misdemeanors

I still can't believe Woody Allen made a film with this title

93%

The Wrong Trousers

along with all the other Wallace and Gromit shorts

100%

The Legend of Drunken Master

the single best Jackie Chan movie ever

83%

Happiness

Todd Solondz' masterwork of bleakness

85%

In The Mood For Love

one of the most critically successful films of the past twenty years

98%

Spirited Away

probably Hayao Miyazaki's most acclaimed film

97%

And I could add another thirty films you’d recognize to that list whose inclusion would surprise you. The most recent film from Wright’s list which is not available to stream in any capacity in Canada is Michael, from 2011.

After those 223 films, there are another 475 films which can only be streamed via a pay-per-rental/library service such as iTunes or Google Play. None of the major streaming services have all of the titles, of course. Google Play has the most (382 of the 475 pay titles accessible), but every service has a few exclusives. Not all of the titles are rentable; some are purchase-only (iTunes in particular does this more often than the others do). It’s also important to note that the overwhelming majority of stuff available on the streaming services is also available via the pay-per-title services as well, but I didn’t keep a running tally of which providers duplicated which streaming services’ options (although Google and iTunes unsurprisingly had far more at a glance than the others did).

Finally, we come to the streaming services, which is probably what people most wanted to know about – and no, Netflix isn’t the one with the most. That honour – in Canada, at least, where we spell honour with a U – goes to TMN Go, our national equivalent of HBO Go, with 106 titles. TMN Go’s diversity of selection is easily the best among any of the streamers, with a good mix of classics and newer releases (many of which are shared in common with Netflix). Netflix comes in second with 80 titles, the vast majority of which are less than fifteen years old. (Netflix’s oldest entry on the list is The Grapes of Wrath from 1940.) Netflix’s recency bias is so strong that were Wright to repeat this exercise in twenty years with a “my 1500 favorite movies of all time” I think their overall share of titles would likely decrease.

After TMN Go and Netflix, the selection gets smaller fast. Third place with 48 titles goes to Tubi, AKA “that free service on your smart TV you never click on,” and because it’s a free service most of their selections are older movies but that’s a pleasant bonus rather than a chore in this case. Next is Fandor, a service for older films and foreign films which I had literally never heard of before doing this exercise, with 33, then Amazon Prime Video with 31 (the Canadian version of Amazon Prime is much less good than the American version, for those wondering). Rounding out the smallest streaming services we have the horror streaming service Shudder with 20, Sundance Now with 17, the CBC’s ici.tou.TV French-language streaming service with 13, and finally Crackle, Sony’s half-assed free network, with 10.

At this point in the blogpost you’re probably expecting me to walk around holding up the big WHAT IT ALL MEANS neon sign, except I’m not sure what it means. I can say a few things affirmatively, though.

One is that Google Play (in particular) has ramped up their library dramatically over the past three years and that their rights system (from what I know of it) tends to encourage stability, because anybody with film rights can just treat Google Play as an additional revenue generator rather than be concerned that they’re giving away streaming rights to a potential competitor like Netflix is. On the other hand, though, Google Play having ramped up their library still leaves them missing about 30-35% of Wright’s list, so they still have a lot of work to do. And, more importantly, renting movies from Google Play might just be re-opening the video store consumption model for the new age, but the thing about video stores is that they were cheaper than going to the movies but still pretty expensive overall, and purchased movies from Google Play (which are often as expensive or only a little cheaper than physical media!) are really just permanent rentals because they’re nearly impossible to download; by design, you watch them on YouTube.

iTunes is, for whatever reason, much less interested in increasing the size of their back catalogue than Google is, and also iTunes is still shit and I refuse to use it, along with all the other pay-per-use services which are worse. One is enough, and Google Play is the best one for multiple reasons, one of which is “it is the least bad and the others are all awful.” (Default, the two sweetest words in the English language!)

Netflix being more interested in becoming a movie studio than a streaming service is not really news, but you really feel the impact of it with this exercise, where less than one in ten of Wright’s movies are available via Netflix. Netflix’s general policy of appeasing the consumer base and not bothering with the long tail that most consumers rarely care about also means it’s utter shit for watching classics, and it’s only gotten worse and worse over the last few years. Still, Netflix has basic technical competency going for it, which is something. TMN Go’s internet interface is garbage. It uses Flash, for crissake. Flash. Their mobile app is similarly nearly unusable. Just like Shomi before it, TMN Go is a service with a great library which is mostly intended for on-demand viewing through a cable box so they half-ass the front-end everywhere else, and then they sit around wondering why nobody wants to sign up for their service. As for the smaller services which aren’t free, they’re really too expensive for anybody but a serious fanatic to drop the coin. Ten bucks a month for a streaming service is great – until you have more than two or three of them, at which point one starts wondering what the point of cord-cutting even is.

So basically everything is up in the air right now, and I don’t know where it’s gonna land – and I’m still skeptical about streaming services, for reasons I think should be obvious.

]]>http://mightygodking.com/2017/10/18/why-i-keep-being-concerned-about-the-rise-of-streaming-services/feed/10MGK’s Theoretically Annual Oscar Predictions Posthttp://mightygodking.com/2017/02/26/mgks-theoretically-annual-oscar-predictions-post/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mgks-theoretically-annual-oscar-predictions-post
http://mightygodking.com/2017/02/26/mgks-theoretically-annual-oscar-predictions-post/#commentsSun, 26 Feb 2017 21:00:36 +0000http://mightygodking.com/?p=10284BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: I have seen nothing in this category, but: a lot of people are predicting that The Salesman will win, because director Asghar Farhadi is directly subject to Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, and because Hollywood is liberal and doesn’t like that sort of thing. I don’t think it’s going to win, for a few reasons. First off, A Separation was an amazing movie, but The Salesman is, judging by critical reaction, not as good as it was, and a lot of Oscar voters do care about the actual – or at least perceived – quality of the movie in question. Second, A Man Called Ove is really very popular with the Academy voters by all accounts, because it is about a grumpy old white man, which is what most of the Academy is (and that also hurts The Salesman, frankly). Third, Oscar voting started about a week before the travel ban was officially announced, and Oscar campaign season well before that, so at least some of the voters had already voted and maybe lost their chance to make a political statement with their vote. So I think A Man Called Ove wins.

BEST ANIMATED FILM: It’s going to be either Zootopia or Moana, because the only other one most people saw is Kubo and the Two Strings, and Laika animated films never win awards regardless of their quality. Zootopia is the better overall film, with a better, smarter and more politically relevant story, and it also made much more money. Moana is the visually prettier of the two films and it has songs in it. Therefore, Moana will win, because old white Academy voters.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM: It’s almost certainly going to be one of the three about race in America – 13th, I Am Not Your Negro or O.J. Made In America. O.J. is eight hours long. It is accordingly not going to win. 13th has Ava DuVernay; I Am Not Your Negro has Samuel L. Jackson as a narrator. I bet on Sam Jackson’s starpower over DuVernay’s taking this.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: The La La landslide starts here, because there are a lot of valid complaints you can make about La La Land, but “it isn’t shot beautifully” is not one of them. You can make a great case for Moonlight‘s striking visual palette (and it would get my vote if it had one), but it is quiet and moody where La La Land is showy and in-your-face about its visual skill, and, again, this is the Academy we’re talking about here. There is an outside chance that they give it to Arrival instead, because that was also visually striking in a showy, in-your-face way and the Oscars sometimes use the major technical categories to spread the love around, but my money is on La La Land.

BEST EDITING: See Best Cinematography above, but this time I think Arrival has an even better chance of winning, because that movie works because of the way it was edited. My gut says La La Land again (sigh) but I am predicting with my heart: Arrival deserves to take this. (Well, actually Moonlight does but “Moonlight is the movie that should actually win everything and will win nothing” is our theme for tonight.)

ORIGINAL SCORE:La La Land, dur. It is a musical for grownups! Hooray!

ORIGINAL SONG: This category basically boils down to “will the two La La Land nominees divide the vote enough for Lin-Manuel Miranda to EGOT” and I think the answer is yes. “City of Stars” is probably the song people identify most with La La Land (and it’s a good song, too), but “Audition” is the Oscar Song Which Was Filmed Like Anne Hathaway Singing Very Emotionally In Les Miserables and that will also get a lot of votes. On top of that, although “How Far I’ll Go” isn’t even the fourth-best song from Moana (“You’re Welcome,” “Where You Are,” “Shiny,” and “We Know The Way” are all better), it’s still a decent enough song from a Disney movie and it’ll get a lot of votes by itself. So it gets my prediction.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:La La Land will probably take this and it’s my guess, but I think there’s a solid case to be made for either Manchester By The Sea (Kenneth Lonergan finally getting his due for not winning his Oscar for You Can Count On Me) or 20th Century Women (one of the big Oscar snubs and a lot of people really loved it, and this is their chance to get it to win something). Still, I am cynical and expect the La La landslide.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: On the one hand Moonlight should win this (and was probably slotted into Best Adapted instead of Best Original so it would win something) but on the other hand Arrival should also win this. I want Moonlight to win SOME goddamn Oscars, so I will predict it, but an Arrival win wouldn’t surprise me.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Mahershala Ali has won pretty much every acting award you can win for his work in Moonlight, and there is no best supporting actor nominee for La La Land to come take it from him, and nobody else in the category is on Ali’s level. (I mean, fuck, Jeff Bridges got nominated for, what, his seventeenth turn as a cowboy type? How many awards does Jeff Bridges need for playing a cowboy type?) He should win this.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Viola Davis should win for Fences, not least because this is her third nomination already and how many times does she need before she wins her friggin’ Oscar? But, alas: #OscarsSoWhite is a thing. And Michelle Williams has a broad base of support for her role in Manchester By The Sea (which by all accounts is excellent). And the Oscars wouldn’t be the Oscars if they didn’t recognize white talent over slightly superior nonwhite talent egregiously at least once in the evening (not counting all those times La La Land is going to beat Moonlight). So I’m gonna guess Williams.

BEST ACTOR: Everybody’s saying Ryan Gosling is the weak link of La La Land but you know what? I think there’s two options for Oscar night: either La La Land destroys everything or the hype engine falls apart. And I don’t think it falls apart, not even in Best Actor, where Denzel Washington is widely considered to be a lock and Casey Affleck the runner-up (and Affleck would be the frontrunner if it weren’t for all his, you know, sexual harassment). I will hatewatch this awards show to death, I swear to god. Gosling wins.

Welcome to the results of the 2016 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

This year we had 717 voters participating. As always, for next year we encourage all of you wrestling media people to nominate yourselves and your favorites, and try to get your fans out to vote for you. Fair is fair!

As always, thank yous to Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

]]>http://mightygodking.com/2017/02/22/the-2016-rspw-awards-full-results/feed/3A lot of well-meaning people don’t understand single-payer healthcarehttp://mightygodking.com/2017/01/09/a-lot-of-well-meaning-people-dont-understand-single-payer-healthcare/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-lot-of-well-meaning-people-dont-understand-single-payer-healthcare
http://mightygodking.com/2017/01/09/a-lot-of-well-meaning-people-dont-understand-single-payer-healthcare/#commentsMon, 09 Jan 2017 18:52:23 +0000http://mightygodking.com/?p=10172I see a lot of sentiment from American liberals and lefties that the United States needs single-payer healthcare, e.g.:

16/ Among the three remaining choices — GOP-Care, Obamacare, and Single Payer Universal Healthcare — the last is the winner.

Now, I understand being frustrated with the American healthcare system. But I think – as a person who considers themselves to generally be a member of the left side of the aisle – that one of the reasons I am left-wing is because I think facts are important and it is likewise important that my political opinions be based on factual output. And a lot of liberals – like this guy here – use the phrase “single-payer” like it means “a solved healthcare system” or “what most of the modern world uses” and neither of these things are true. And I say that as someone who lives in a country with an actual single-payer system!

So, let’s go question-and-answer for a while.

What is single-payer healthcare?

It is a healthcare system where either the sole or primary provider of health insurance and/or healthcare is the state. If you get sick, you go to the doctor, you flash your health card (a card that confirms your enrollment in the single-payer healthcare system) and you get treatment. Some systems may require you to purchase supplemental healthcare insurance for certain elements of healthcare provision.

And this is basically what everybody but the United States uses, right?

Oh, heavens no. Canada, the UK, Norway, Sweden and Finland are about the only countries that use anything close to the mental conception most Americans have of “single-payer,” and even all of these countries have some digressions from how single-payer traditionally works. Speaking as a Canadian, here is a short list of things our “single-payer” system doesn’t cover: prescriptions, dental care, vision/optical care, home care, ambulance use, and doctor’s notes. You will note that those are some pretty big gaps there.

Most first-world countries have a sort of mix of private and public care to achieve universal healthcare:

Japan pays for 70% of everybody’s healthcare expenses up to an individual limit, but it’s on individuals to pay the other 30%. (Japan historically manages this by strictly limiting user fees, but Shinzo Abe seems determined to rework their system entirely so this summary may be out of date within six months of its writing.) It also requires citizens to have personal health insurance, although it maintains an insurance fund for those who cannot afford their own.

Italy has a system of public hospitals which everybody can use, but also a system of private hospitals which require insurance. Spain does much the same thing.

France achieves universal care by requiring all citizens to enroll in health insurance plans, which are provided by a small number of national-level non-profit private insurers who deduct their fees from your paycheque and a national fund for the poor/elderly/indigent/etc.

Germany has about 130 government operated “sickness funds” – government-regulated insurers – which cover about 90% of the population, including everybody who makes less than 50K euro per year, and a system of private insurers who cover the other 10%, who are mostly the upper-class.

Australia and New Zealand have fairly explicit two-tier systems: medicare-for-all, but better-medicare-if-you-pay-for-it systems.

The Netherlands requires everybody to get private insurance, which is highly regulated so as to avoid insurer abuse.

…some of those sound sort of like Obamacare. But Obamacare seems sort of bad. What’s the difference?

Well, a few things. (And we’ll continue to call it “Obamacare” rather than “the ACA” because, despite the inaccuracies, why not.)

Firstly, Obamacare was designed to have a Medicaid expansion for poorer people who couldn’t afford insurance on their own. Many states, however – mostly controlled by Republicans – decided that they didn’t want to expand Medicaid but that they still wanted the for-profit insurance subsidies, and sued over this. The Supreme Court sided with the states, because it had a majority of partisan conservatives on it. This created an insurance gap in a lot of states where it was least helpful to have one.

Secondly, Obamacare’s general principle was “for people who make too much to be eligible for Medicaid, even post-expansion, we will subsidize people who cannot afford insurance so they can buy insurance that is decent.” The subsidies were, bluntly, not quite high enough, and as a result some people (although far less than the media might have you believe) have resorted to buying near-worthless high-deductible plans.

Third, Obamacare does nothing to create true cost controls on healthcare expenses. A lot of healthcare in America costs more for no reason other than it costs more. Obamacare did not attack cost controls for a lot of reasons, most notably because Republicans weren’t willing to agree to any such thing, and because Obama couldn’t get some Democratic Senators on board for even minor cost controls – most notably Joe Lieberman, a strong contender for being one of the worst people alive, who utterly refused any “public option” (i.e. a government-run insurer who would force private insurers’s costs downward by offering lower prices) up to and including the idea of expanding Medicare to become a buy-in option for anybody who wished to do so (a position he had previously endorsed, because Joe Lieberman is a terrible person) and as a result Obamacare was forced to pass without a public option.

It should also be noted that any push for cost controls would provoke holy war with both the insurance lobby and doctors (whose salaries are part of the reason prices are high). And people generally like their doctors.

But why didn’t he just go with single-payer –

Because it was not feasible. There’s been this meme created among the left that Obama didn’t try hard enough to pass single-payer, but he didn’t try hard enough to pass single-payer because he had exactly 60 votes in the Senate for approximately nine months, exactly the number necessary to pass a filibuster, which meant that he needed every single Democratic vote to pass anything since the GOP were not going to vote for anything he proposed (up to and including proposals they helped draft, which was the entire point of the “Gang of Six” negotiations in 2009 – getting the GOP to help draft a new healthcare law so it would pass, except they then admitted they wouldn’t vote for it even under those circumstances). Which meant, in turn, that conservative Democrats like Lieberman could hold the entire process hostage. Which they were more than happy to do.

But we should go with single-payer now, right?

Speaking as someone in a single-payer system, it is not all bread-and-roses. Single-payer systems mean that every medical concern can become political drama because the government ultimately decides which treatments it is willing to pay for. This means that anybody dying of, say, some horrible cancer can suggest that the government refusing to pay for a given treatment which might still be considered experimental can turn it into a wedge issue. It doesn’t have to be life-or-death stuff either; last year in Ontario parents of kids with autism successfully lobbied for extended treatment schedules for their kids.

Single-payer also means that the government has to guarantee a given standard of coverage geographically speaking. That means patients in rural areas need service guarantees. That gets expensive too. And, of course, because single-payer usually means stretching care dollars as much as possible, it does generally correlate with increased wait times for services. Not perfectly and not so dramatically as a lot of American conservatives pretend – but it is a pressure more or less inherent to the system.

What Americans should do is recognize that Obamacare mostly does what it set out to do: vastly expand healthcare coverage, most of which is reasonably good coverage. Most of what it does is politically popular. The problems with it are relatively straightforward: the subsidies aren’t large enough, the system is still somewhat byzantine and some states are interfering with the Medicaid expansion. Neither of these problems are unsolvable in and of themselves: increase the subsidy level, for example (and offset it with a new tax of some kind) and you’ve fixed 90% of the problems with coverage, and then can turn your attention to cost controls as the next issue to resolve once everybody has their insurance and is all “this is pretty great.” (Well, except for the bit where most of the anti-Obamacare animus is actually racially driven. Good luck with that.)

But for crissake, The Left, stop insisting that single-payer is the only way to go. It isn’t. Most of the countries with the best for-dollar health outcomes don’t even use single-payer. “Single-payer” has become a sort of meme rather than anything meaningful, a way for progressives to show their lefty bona fides by being Against The System, Man, and isn’t Obamacare just a sop to insurance companies by making us pay for insurance? Well, yes, but insurance mandates aren’t a new thing: most non-single-payer countries have them, and even most single-payer countries which just take the money out of your taxes directly are usually paying private healthcare providers anyway so it’s almost always a transfer of public money to private concerns. What matters is how well that transfer is regulated and the quality of service received. “Single payer” doesn’t really move that needle at all.

UPDATE:Unfortunately there was a tech snafu almost immediately on our end as a result of an accidental Limesurvey mis-save, which was causing the survey to crash on the third page (it was trying to load data that was slightly different than what existed). We’ve fixed the problem by rebooting into a fresh survey, but those of you who had already begun your ballots have unfortunately lost your progress so far and will have to restart the essay (we have updated all links to the survey in this post to reflect the new survey). We apologize for the inconvenience.

This is the Call for Votes for the 2015 RSPW (Theszie) Awards. You can vote here.

The Theszies are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash of the Champions XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into pulldown menus to make voting faster and easier (since the pulldown menus should include most, if not all, of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves.

We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination, as well as culling the nominations somewhat to make the ballot more manageable (we applied a max nominee count of 30 to most categories). Remember, though: if your candidate for an award isn’t nominated, you can always write him in.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2016.

Changes this year: No new categories! No deleted categories! For the first time in years, the category count is stable! Hooray!

There is one minor change, however: due to the Cruiserweight Classic as well as New Japan becoming much easier to stream, we have decided to treat televised/streamed multi-night tournaments lasting longer than three nights (such as the Classic or the G1 Climax) as “regular shows” rather than “major shows” for the sake of category classification. Individual nights within said tournaments (such as the Cruiserweight Classic Finale) still qualify as “major shows.”

Let me just explain why this is bad, because it is bad on multiple levels and thus frustrating to watch. (I checked out around, oh, Moby or thereabouts.)

1.) It is essentially impossible to do. First off, the members of the Electoral College – and particularly the Republican members of the Electoral College – are, to a one, party loyalists. That’s why they became electors in the first place. These are not people you are going to easily peel off from the Republican party, regardless of how corrupt, incompetent or awful Donald Trump is. Saying “just thirty-seven of you need to not vote for Donald Trump” is like saying “you only need to climb thirty-seven mountains.” It is not technically impossible, but for practical intents and purposes given the time frame you are working with, it might as well be. These aren’t Democrats, who consider themselves all to be precious flowers and therefore will generate electors who are oh-so-special that they can’t in good conscience vote for Hillary Clinton. When Republican electors felt they couldn’t in good conscience vote for Trump, they resigned.

2.) It is mostly pointless because there is no superior option available. At this point it seems worth reminding that the grand plan of the “Hamilton electors” (and I love Hamilton, but god, I hate the effect it’s had on political discourse sometimes) is to create a situation where the House of Representatives gets to determine who will be the next President. Firstly, it is worth remembering that the House is Republican anyway, and the most likely thing they will do is vote for Donald Trump anyway, because the GOP base loves Trump and the GOP likely understands that if they were to vote for anybody else to be President they would get slaughtered in 2018 and 2020, because they’d be under attack both from the Democrats on the left1 and from Trump and his loyalists on the right.

But let’s say the House decides to vote for somebody else other than Donald Trump. You’re not going to get anybody reasonable. You’re not even going to get Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney, who would be a right-wing conservative President but maybe not totally wreck everything. You’re going to get Mike Pence, who is a Christian dominionist in all but name and will pass laws to make it legal to discriminate against gays whenever and wherever, or you will get Paul Ryan, who will work overtime to completely destroy the social safety nets of America in favour of tax cuts for the rich, or you will get Marco Rubio, who actively advocated for a Muslim registry harder than Donald Trump did, or you will get John Kasich, who will pass anti-abortion laws throughout the country. And really, any one of these people will give you all of those things, plus destroying civil rights, environmental protections, labor laws and giving you as many far-right Supreme Court justices as they can possibly manage while gerrymandering districts and killing voter protections as much as possible to ensure that their system of minority rule can remain intact.

No matter what happens with the Electoral College, the next President will be a disaster for anybody who cares about the rule of law, because the GOP as a whole actively does not consider anybody to the left of Lindsay Graham to be allowed to govern. You’re already seeing this in North Carolina, where the GOP lost the governorship and the Supreme Court and reacted by introducing reams of emergency legislation to take away the governor’s traditional powers and give them to the gerrymandered legislature they still control. You saw it for six years of the GOP Congress under Obama, ending with their refusal to even vote on (much less confirm) his Supreme Court nominee. Now that they have power, they’re going to actively work to cement their stranglehold on political control, regardless of the fact that they’re less popular than the actual majority vote by far.

Yes, Trump will be worse than any of the other options, because he will be personally and systematically corrupt, and because he will be much more disastrous on foreign policy as tyrants seek to buy him off (and that will happen). But in the end, Trump’s move to fascism will simply be overt, as opposed to the stealthy fascism the GOP will institute, and frankly, it’s probably going to be easier to oppose if it is overt.

Finally, 3.) It is antidemocratic and democratic principles matter. Let’s be honest: if the tables were switched and Clinton had won the EC but lost the popular vote, and Trump was personally campaigning to have electors switch the vote because he won the popular vote, we would rightly call that deplorable. The election of 2016 was conducted under a set of rules to which all parties agreed2 and Trump won under those rules.3 The fact that the Electoral College has an escape switch that is archaic and has not been used in literally centuries does not mean anybody should seek to use it, regardless of whatever the fuck Alexander Hamilton wrote about it. Remember: Alexander Hamilton also helped design the Electoral College working under the impression that political parties wouldn’t exist, which was one of the stupider things he believed, so maybe let’s not be those people who fetishize what the Founding Fathers wrote because they got a lot of shit just wrong.

There’s no easy way to say this: you either care about the rule of law or you don’t. As a liberal, I care about the rule of law because I think it is important for people to have the opportunity to self-determine how they are governed. That’s literally the entire point of democracy. When I see my fellow libs and lefties growing despondent because Donald Trump won a minority of the popular vote and effectively only won on technicalities and now will move to seize power, I can understand that because it’s saddening. It actively hurts to recognize that the other side of the political spectrum has finally abandoned all pretense of comity or political principle and become motivated solely by the opportunity to exercise power.

But that doesn’t make me want to abandon rule of law. It doesn’t make me want to abandon my principles. I believe in democracy and no feeble MAGA-hat wearing motherfucker is going to make me think differently about that.4 And if you’ve given up on democracy, I don’t know why you’re wasting time supporting this fucked up “Hamilton electors” plan; you might as well just go get a rifle and start picking your targets, because if you’ve decided that all that matters is the exercise of power, you’re effectively just Che Guevara in nicer clothes.

Important: Do not go get a rifle and start picking targets, for crissake. That was hyperbole.

Instead of that, and instead of the stupid electoral college plan, what you and all other lib/left Americans should be doing is, well, all of this. Use your voice proactively to build towards 2018 (not 2020, 2018 – the governorships and Congress matter tremendously right away for protecting voter rights and preventing gerrymandering), and start right now. You know this can work, because the Tea Party used exactly these same tactics to overwhelm the GOP and turn it into a permanent clown college. There is no reason not to do the same, except for much better and more productive and fairer ends. Go on. Do the work.

Well, hopefully; it’s the Democratic party and we should never underestimate their capacity to try to Be Reasonable And Work With The Other Side no matter how terrible the other side is.

Granted, there was not a lot of choice about the agreement, but consenting to work within a system is de facto consent to it.

Do not even start with the recount thing. If there was any chance the recounts could actually have turned things around, the Clinton campaign would have been on them like white on rice.

As a Canadian I of course extend this disgust towards Kellie Leitch wholeheartedly. Fuck you, Kellie. You’re the goddamn worst.